Rwanda – Beyond the Deadly Pit

Gilbert Ndahayo is a survivor of the Rwanda genocide. In 1994, the Hutus killed his parents, along with 200 other people, in a small village near Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The corpses were thrown into a pit. Some of the people were buried alive there, after being raped.

From 2006, the mass grave began to be exhumed, so that the relatives could at least give a dignified funeral to their relatives. The agony of the past burns excruciatingly, as the survivors are still forced to live amongst the perpetrators of one of the most brutal massacres in history. The pain and the trauma suffered by the victims will never be alleviated. But will they be able to forgive their torturers, and go on with their lives?

Rwanda has become a laboratory for historians, anthropologists and social scientists. The attempt of reproducing there the (half) successful tribunal for the reconciliation launched by Nelson Mandela in South Africa is going on, just as the constant exhumation of bodies and new horrors.

But in this documentary there are no theories, no historians to reconstruct what happened, no explanations. Ndahayo himself is the protagonist. He is the first Rwandan genocide survivor to make a personal film about the genocide, and as such the only kind of person entitled to go deeper into what happened, into the pain of the people who watched their loved ones being massacred, the only one who is entitled to answer the questions about forgiveness, about how to cope with pain. He films himself asking questions during the trial of his father’s murderer, once a good acquaintance of the family. He films the women in charge of digging up the bones and giving a name and burial place to the victims. He films the students in Kigali, trying to go on and build lives beyond the pain. In the end, although he finds the strength to say “I forgive you” to the person who killed his father, he cannot provide answers. Going beyond the deadly pit is not entirely possible, ever, yet it is the condition upon which to live.

By Marta Musso